If in order to keep pregnancy as a weapon of survival she has to
accept illegal abortion and risk death, she will do it—alone, in silence, isolated, the only reproach for her rebellion against actual pregnancy being death or maiming. In this mess of illegal abortion,
she will have confirmed what she has been taught about her own
nature as a woman and about all women. She deserves punishment; illegal abortion is punishment for sex. She feels shame: she may consider it the shame of sex but it is in part the shame that
any human in captivity feels in being used—women being used in
sex feel shame inseparable from sex. The shame will confirm that
she deserves suffering; suffering in sex and birth and aborted birth
is the curse of her sex; illegal abortion is deserved suffering. But
illegal abortion also serves her because it puts abortion out of sight.
No one has to be confronted with another woman making a choice,
choosing not to be a mother. No one must face women openly with
priorities other than marriage and conformity. No one must face a
woman refusing to be bound by pregnancy. The women who rebel
against their function must do it secretly, not causing grief, embarrassment, or confusion to other women isolated in their own reproductive quagmires, each on her own, each alone, each being a woman for all women in silence and in suffering and in solitude.
With illegal abortion life or death is up to God: each time, one
submits to the divine hand, divine finger on divine revolver pointed
at the already bloody flesh of a woman, divine Russian roulette. It
is a final, humiliated submission to the will of a superior Male who
judges absolutely. Death is a judgment and so is life. Illegal abortion is an individual hell; one suffers, does penance: God decides; life is forgiveness. And no one need face it until it happens to
her— until she is the one caught. This is the w ay in which women
are moral idiots in this system: ignoring whatever has to do with
other women, all women, until or unless it happens to oneself.
Right-wing women also believe that a woman who refuses to bear a
child deserves to die. Right-wing women are prepared to accept
that judgment against themselves; and when they survive, they are
guilty and prepared to pay— to m artyr themselves for an act of will
to which they had no right as women. There is no better measure
of what forced sex does to women— how it destroys self-respect
and the w ill to survive as a self-determining human being— than
the opposition of right-wing women to legal abortion: to what they
need to save themselves from being butchered. The training of a
girl to accept her place in sex in marriage and the use of a woman
in sex in marriage means the annihilating of any will toward self-
determination or freedom; her personhood is so demeaned that it
becomes easier to risk death or maiming than to say no to a man
who will fuck you anyw ay, with the blessings of God and state, ’til
death do you part.
4
Jews and Homosexuals
A minister from Oklahoma, dressed in a shiny brown polyester
suit, hair greased down even shinier than the shiny suit, smile from
ear to ear even shinier than the shiny hair, was picketing, leaf-
leting, and preaching outside the Sam Houston Coliseum in
